Sophia Chau's blog

Sophia Chau is a PhD student with Jianguo (Jack) Liu. She studied environmental science at the University of Notre Dame. She also spent some time in California working for the National Park Service’s Climate Change Response Program.

Sophia Chau is a PhD student with Jianguo (Jack) Liu. She studied environmental science at the University of Notre Dame. She also spent some time in California working for the National Park Service’s Climate Change Response Program.

How are the relationships between people and ecosystems shifting with climate change? How can we respond to these shifts in ways that improve these relationships? Over the last several months, the questions that come back to me again and again can be summed up by these two questions. And I think I’ve found a study system that can help me answer them: US national parks.

Sophia Chau is a PhD student with Jianguo (Jack) Liu. She studied environmental science at the University of Notre Dame. She also spent some time in California working for the National Park Service’s Climate Change Response Program. This is an excerpt from her blog.

My childhood home sits on a big hill just outside Portland, Oregon. From my bedroom window I often gazed at the familiar and pointy snow-capped peak of Mt. Hood looming in the distance. If I turned northward on a clear day, I could just make out the peaks of Mts. Rainier and St. Helens. These peaks are a significant part of my identity as a Pacific Northwester, but I never thought much about them until relatively recently, after I started living in the Midwest (which is, by the way, as flat as a pancake).

Sophia Chau is a PhD student with Jianguo Liu. She studied environmental science at the University of Notre Dame. She also spent some time in California working for the National Park Service’s Climate Change Response Program. This is an excerpt from her blog.

“What are you researching?” Since starting my PhD program at MSU this fall, I have been asked this question countless times, but it is one to which I have no definite answer yet.

Some grad students start their studies by joining an ongoing project, while others begin from scratch and create their own project. I fall into the latter category. The freedom to research (almost) whatever I want is both exhilarating and daunting. While this freedom gives me the opportunity to shape my own questions and pursue their answers in my own way, it also means starting from ground zero and figuring out how to put the puzzle pieces together.

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The Center for Systems Integration and Sustainability at Michigan State University integrates ecology with socioeconomics, demography and other disciplines for ecological sustainability from local, national to global scales.

Coupled Human and Natural Systems(CHANS) are integrated systems in which humans and natural components interact. CHANS research has recently emerged as an exciting and integrative field of cross-disciplinary scientific inquiry to find sustainable solutions that both benefit the environment and enable people to thrive. Visit CHANS-Net, the international network of research on coupled human and natural systems, for information and ways to engage.